True, and I'm all for punishing the platform. When we do so we're also punishing ourselves however. They're losing potential monetary value, we're the ones losing knowledge. (I'm assuming they have full backups and could trivially undo the deletions for purposes such as selling LLM training data, so the amount of harm we're doing them really is only limited to "engagement" numbers)
Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.
I think that's the intent. If Reddit turns evil, users can choose to punish the platform for that.